Gail Davis

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Gail Davis (October 5, 1925 – March 15, 1997) was an American actress, best known for her role as Annie Oakley in a 1950s television Western series.

Life and career

The daughter of a small town physician, she was born as Betty Jeanne Grayson in a hospital at Little Rock, but raised in McGehee, Arkansas, until her family moved to Little Rock. She had been singing and dancing since childhood. After graduating from high school, she went to study drama at Bryn Mawr,^{[citation needed]} before completing her education at the University of Texas at Austin. At Austin she met and married Bob Davis, with whom she had a daughter, Terrie.

She and her husband moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in motion pictures. Mrs. Davis told an interviewer how she acquired her professional acting name. "I went under contract to MGM around 1946. They told me 'we can't have a Betty Davis, because of Bette Davis, and we can't have a Betty Grayson because of Kathryn Grayson'.... [T]hen a guy in the casting department said 'how about Gail Davis?' So that's where it came from."^[1]

In 1947 she made her motion picture debut in a comedy film short. She then appeared in minor roles in another four films until landing a supporting role under star Roy Rogers in a 1948 Western film, The Far Frontier. Between then and 1953, Davis appeared in more than three dozen films, all but three of which were in the Western genre, including fourteen films with the singing cowboy star, Gene Autry.

In 1950, she began to guest star in television Westerns, notably in the The Cisco Kid, in which she appeared six times in two roles, including that of a niece whose uncle is trying to stop her pending marriage to a gangster. She also guest starred in the The Lone Ranger and The Adventures of Kit Carson (twice in the role of Rose Banning). She appeared more than a dozen times on The Gene Autry Show.

Between 1954 and 1956, Davis starred in the syndicated Annie Oakley series, later rebroadcast on ABC. Her costars were Brad Johnson as Deputy Lofty Craig and Jimmy Hawkins as her younger brother, Tagg Oakley. An adroit horseback rider, Davis also toured North America in Gene Autry's traveling rodeo. She went on to manage other celebrities. ^[2]

Davis and her second husband, Garl Guerriero, retired to the San Fernando Valley.^[3] During her retirement Davis made guest appearances at western memorabilia shows and film festivals. Her last public appearance was in 1994, when she received the Golden Boot Award from the Motion Picture and Television Fund. ^[4]

Death

Davis died of cancer in Los Angeles, aged 71. She was interred there in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery.

For her contribution to the television industry, Gail Davis has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Blvd. In 2004, she was posthumously inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth.

External links

• Gail Davis at the Internet Movie Database
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture web article

References